After the latest progress updates on the Gemini PDA campaign I have now decided to open a new forum dedicated to it. I have divided it into 3 subforums (hardware, Linux and Android). In the next months I'll post there any news and updates about this project, and anyone having an interest on this device is of course welcomed to contribute.

Ashish Gulhati, who is according to Wikipedia "[...] one of India's first online activists and open source hackers", is currently holding a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for a portable case for the Raspberry Pi Zero, called Noodle PI.

The project includes a high-resolution multi-touch screen, a battery, a power management system, and a camera inside the case. With 7 days still remaining for the end of the campaign, it has already reached CA$ 9,821 of its CA$ 1,024 goal. It's third stretch goal has been enabled, too: the production of the Noodle Key Micro dock, which allows to use a readily available backlit mini-keyboard with the device, making the device a fully fledged UMPC.

On a side note, mr. Gulhati still owns a Zaurus SL-C3100, which he claims to be the most usable among all the portable devices he has owned, although "[...] it was still too small and fiddly, and didn't have backlit keys or built-in WiFi or Bluetooth", hence the need for this project.

As previously announced, I have now set the Portal as the forum's main page. I have created 4 new forums for the news too, all the threads opened there will appear on the portal, while all the other (sub)forums will appear only on the main forum, as always. Let me know if you like this change, and if any of you would like to help me with posting news items.

I have followed the suggestion made by koan, now the portal and the forum can be reached as follows:

As you have noticed, we have now a new forum layout which should better serve the current needs, a long overdue change I believe. This is what has been changed:

- many forums, which are not used anymore since years, have now been archived in a new Archived forums section. All the forums there are read-only, so no new thread can be added or replied to. If required, you can open a new thread in one of the active forums and link to the older thread- some older forums have been merged into single ones- the whole forum is now not a (mostly) Zaurus-only one anymore; the sections which are devoted to the Zaurus are now clearly labeled as such. This is done so that any newcomer will find it easier to find out, in the Model Specific section, to which model is each forum related to.

The ELSI and Wiki forums will remain the same as before, we'll eventually change them when both the Wiki and the ELSI will be back online.

If you need any new forum to be opened, or any old one to be taken out of the archive, please let me know.

I think it is time to update all of you on what's happening behind the scenes, regarding this forum's administration. I have some good news for you to share: Speculatrix and me have finally gained access to the OESF's shell account on ibiblio. This means that we can now remove all the malware that has gathering here during the last years. I have done a preliminary search and cleanup, unfortunately there are still files though which can be only removed by the host's admins, I'll get in touch with them once I'll complete the list of all the malicious files. We have now a complete backup of both the forum's files and the database, I'm doing manual backups for now but I'll see if I can set an automatic rsync setup. Also, Speculatrix and me have been thinking of upgrading the Invision Power Board software to the latest version (we are using the 2.3.1 version, which was in September 2007; the current version is 4.1.17.1), in order to make it more secure to all the latest malware floating around, more about this later.

We can now put back online the Wiki, too; there's already a great replacement Wiki that has been recently setup by koan (thanks!), we can decide to keep it there or move it on this server. For now, in place of the old Wiki pages I have put a redirection link to the forum itself, so that it can be accessed by just typing oesf.org. Regarding elsix, all the files are unfortunately stored on a different account on ibiblio, and for now we still don't have access to it. I'll keep hunting for the account details, also there are a couple of ex-maintainers which we can get in touch with.

That's it for now. What I'd really like for this forum is to continue to be a reference for both all the information regarding the Zaurus (and I believe it's the only remaining English forum devoted to it), and any other present and future device which shares the same philosophy as the Z.

Hello Everyone,It's been a long time. we're all older and greyer I'm sure.

I appointed a new moderator today, thanks Varti for being volunteered.

I also amended the sign-up/validation process to hopefully make it easier for someone to become a member. Even the validation forums had become full of spam. Varti kindly cleaned a lot of it out, I only did the first four pages, Varti did the other 20-ish!

I'd like some other active members to volunteer to be moderators too. And if people can second their appointment, promote someone to be an admin as well.

One problem we have is that there doesn't appear to be anyone with a shell account on the server, or ftp access to remove some of the dodgy files which have been put onto the server when security was breached. I am hoping we can get that and make things better.

I'll try and spin another whole forum archive using httrack and post a squashfs archive with namazu free text DB like I once did long ago.

All - I wanted to first apologize for the recent outage with the site/forums. If you've been around for any length of time you'll know that an outage like this rarely happens.

I want to make sure that everyone knows that Roy and I are still dedicated to the site and forums. We know how important it is to the community, even after all these years.

If you want to know the details of what went wrong, read on. Otherwise, please rest assured that the site and forums are here to stay. We can't of course guarantee no down time ever, that just wouldn't be realistic. We do appreciate how much knowledge that this community has built over the last decade (or more). I also want people to know that the Roy is able to get a hold of me outside of the forums. Also, even though I'm not on the forums much anymore, I'm still very much connected to them and I know when things go wrong.

------The site/forums are registered with Dreamhost, and at one point they used to be hosted with Dreamhost as well. Many, many years ago I had the site/forums hosted on dedicated servers to accommodate the bandwidth and usage needs. It cost me a couple hundred each month and as you know I've been very deliberate about keeping annoying ads out of the forums (unlike many other forums). My desire has never been to make money from this, just to provide a service to the community. After a while Roy and I found out that we could leverage ibiblio (thanks ibiblio!) to host the site/forums for free. I changed from a dedicated hosting plan with dreamhost to a regular shared server plan (to have the site/forums hosted on ibiblio, but the domain registration/renewals and DNS stayed with dreamhost). For some reason I couldn't just "change hosting plans" with my dreamhost account, I had to create a new account, move the sites/domains/registrations/DNS over and close the old account. This is where the problem apparently started...

I received an email a couple weeks ago (can't remember the exact date, but that's when the site went down) saying oesf.org has been deleted from the registry (as well as elsix.org, zaurususergroup.org and a couple other domains). There was no explanation or anything... just that it was deleted. I worked with dreamhost support to have them explain what the hell went wrong and apparently they didn't complete the move of the domain registration/renewls from my old (dedicated server) account to the new (shared hosting) account. Because of this, the annual domain renewals for the last couple years had not been paid. They never emailed me saying, 'hey, you have an outstanding balance' or notified me within the dreamhost control panel. They didn't say anything for years!

Because the domain was deleted from the registry, it of course went down completely. After working with (the largely incompetent) dreamhost support team (all via email, they have no phone support) they told me that I had to pay the past due domain renewals AND I had to pay $100 per domain for redemption, or wait 60 or so days for the sites to become available to re-register. This to me was complete bullshit. They didn't let me know that I owed anything, didn't let me know that the sites would be deleted.. no communication prior to them all being deleted. Yet, I got the email saying that they had been deleted... so they did know how to email me (it's not like they had an old email).

I immediately paid the past due renewals (rightfully mine to pay) but told them that I would not pay for the $100 redemption fees for each domain. I told them that because of their screw up (many) they should cover the costs. Ultimately I got to a support manager and he agreed that they had made the mistake and agreed to cover the redemption. I would have paid the redemption for oesf.org just to get it back online, but had I done so I wouldn't have any leverage to get them to reimburse me.

Dreamhost has fixed the account and the domain is setup for auto renewal (like all of my other domains). I haven't been happy with dreamhost for a while now, and last year registered/created a site with godaddy.com. In the near future, I will be migrating oesf (and my other domains) to godaddy. Dreamhost doesn't deserve my business anymore.